Today’s addition of 13 new languages brings the total number of languages Google Translate understands to 103. The update allows 120 million more people around the world to use the service and will be rolling out over the next couple of days to the web and mobile apps.
If you travel internationally, you’re well aware that Google Translate’s visual translation features — which originated as the Word Lens app — are invaluable. Today, Google announced that the app has added support for 20 new languages, bringing the total up to 27.
Today, we’re updating the Google Translate app again—expanding instant visual translation to 20 more languages (for a total of 27!), and making real-time voice translations a lot faster and smoother—so even more people can experience the world in their language.
The app originally supported English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
As of today, you can now translate to and from Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. You can also do one-way translations from English to Hindi and Thai.
Google has long had Optical Character Recognition features in Google Drive, allowing scanned paper document uploaded to Drive to be indexed and edited. Now, Google just recently expanded the feature to more than 200 languages and 25 writing styles.
To make this possible, engineering teams across Google pursued an approach to OCR focused on broad language coverage, with a goal of designing an architecture that could potentially work with all existing languages and writing systems. We do this in part by using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to make sense of the input as a whole sequence, rather than first trying to break it apart into pieces. This is similar to how modern speech recognition systems recognize audio input…
Once you scan a document and upload it to Drive, you just need to right-click on it and select ‘Open with’ -> ‘Google Docs’.
Google adds that you don’t even need to set your language preference, Drive will automatically detect it when uploading a document.
You can access the OCR features both on the web and through the Google Drive app for Android.
Just weeks after receiving a Material Design makeover for Android Lollipop, the popular custom keyboard SwiftKey for Android has been updated with performance improvements and support for twelve new languages. The latest version of SwiftKey for Android is available now through the Play Store as a free update.
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Google today announced a new feature for its Google Search app for Android, catering to the billions of people in the world who speak more than one language. Previously, you had to manually switch between the language you wanted Google to recognize, but now you’re just a flick of a switch away from being able to speak in multiple languages at once—and Google will be able seamlessly switch with you.
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Google originally launched App Indexing for Android users back in December before rolling it out globally in English for a number of apps back in April. As pictured above, the feature allows content from Android apps to show up in search results with a button for users to quickly launch the app. Today the company announced it’s expanding the feature once again and launching it for apps in several languages other than English. It’s also added some other English results in the U.S. including the Walmart, Tapatalk, and Fancy apps.
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Google announced today on Google+ that its updating its Google Translate app for Android with additional language support for two features including camera input translation and handwriting.
New languages for camera input translation, which allows users to take translate text capture with the device’s camera, include “Afrikaans, Greek, Hebrew and Serbian.” Google notes that the update brings the total number of supported languages supported for the camera translations feature to 34.
Simply tap the camera button, point at the text you want translated and take the picture, and brush over the text you want with your finger—in an instant you’ll see your translation.
The updated app also includes support handwriting characters in two additional languages: Hindi and Thai. That brings the total number of supported languages to 48.
The new version of Google Translate for Android is available for free on Google Play now.
After hitting 5 million downloads and over 1 billion games played since launching on iOS a little over 4 months ago, betaworks-backed game “Dots” is today making its way to Android users for the time. The simplistic puzzle game, which sees users “connect as many same-colored dots” as they can during a 60 second timeframe, will be available as a free download sometime later today.
The announcement also comes with a new “moves mode” that does away with the time restriction but introduces a 30 move limit, as well as new trophies and support for a number of new languages, including: German, Spanish, French, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic.
Keep an eye on the Google Play store for the Dots game arriving any minute now.
Google announced today on its Google Drive Blog that it is adding a number of new languages for its Google Drive apps including Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides on both mobile and desktop. The new languages include:
Afrikaans, Amharic, Basque, Chinese (Hong Kong), Estonian, French (Canada), Galician, Icelandic, Khmer, Lao, Malaysian, Nepali, Persian, Sinhalese, Spanish (Latin America), Swahili, Urdu, Zulu
Google noted that the majority of the languages are also supported by the built-in spellchecker in Drive and users will also be able to switch back and forth between languages. You’ll also be able to collaborate on Drive files in one language while collaborators use another.
The 18 new languages added today brings the total number of languages supported in Drive up to 65.
The new languages are available starting today through Drive on the web and through the iOS and Android apps.
Google has updated its Android Translate app with a new Phrasebook feature to store some translated phrases that users want to keep quickly accessible. Phrasebook can easily sync via your Google Account’s login credentials.
When you’re traveling in another country, you want quick access to your favorite translated phrases—whether it’s “Where can I find a museum?” or “Do you know where the bathroom is?” Google Translate lets you save these translations in your Phrasebook, but you still could not easily access them on the go from your phone or tablet. Starting today, you can automatically sync the phrases in your Phrasebook to your Android device using the Google Translate mobile app, so you can carry your most useful phrases with you wherever you go.
Additionally, Google has added support for 16 new languages for camera-input translations.
Last but not least, this latest release of Google Translate for Android sees a significant improvement to the camera-input feature. You can now use camera-input to find translations in 16 additional languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Swedish.
While hundreds of millions of Spanish speakers around the globe have had the option to use Gmail in Latin America Spanish since last year, a number of other popular Google services didn’t offer the Español language setting. Now, Google has announced on its Official Gmail Blog that it is expanding support for its Latin American Spanish language option to Google Calendar:
If you’re new to Calendar but already using Gmail in Latin American Spanish, just visit google.com/calendar and language settings will be ready to go. If you’ve used Calendar in the past, you’ll need to update your language settings by clicking on the gear icon in the mid-upper right of Calendar, then selecting Settings: Once in General Settings, Language you can select Español (Latinoamérica).
You’ll also be able to access the Español (Latinoamérica) setting for Calendar on Android devices through your device’s “Language Settings” within Settings.
Google announced an update today to Google Translate for Android that brings an extremely useful feature for those who are traveling or in need of translations when without an Internet connection. Starting today, the updated Android app will now allow users running devices on Android 2.3 and up to access the service using downloadable offline language packages.
Google noted that there are currently around 50 languages available for offline use and detailed how to download the necessary packages through the app:
You can select [Offline Languages] in the app menu to see all the offline language packages available for download. To enable offline translation between any two languages, you just need to select them in the offline languages menu. Once the packages are downloaded, you’re good to go.
While the languages packages provide everything you need to get quick translations when offline, Google warned that the offline modes are “less comprehensive than their online equivalents” without explaining in detail.
Users of the updated app will also now be able to translate vertical text for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean—using their device’s camera.
The updated Google Translate app for Android is available now through Google Play.
